Girls' Hannah - Why the millennial antihero was so hated

so um i guess i'm not what you would describe as like a chill girl i'm not like a cool relaxed lady hannah on girls was widely deemed one of the most annoying tv characters of the 2010s but was she just misunderstood when girls premiered in 2012 the show inspired a deluge of conversation critics raved about the show's portrayal of the murk of post-adolescence how it made viewers uncomfortable while preferring a new sharp slightly bitter flavor of introspective female comedy or how it honestly looked at serious topics tv rarely covered i don't really think you would understand any of my problems because you seem like you have a tremendous amount of willpower and general togetherness but a backlash soon grew mother jones called girls an unstoppably irritating show about an unsympathetic victim of first world problems perhaps the most controversial hated and misunderstood part of the buzz around girls was star and creator lena dunham's main character hannah horvith i have work and then i have a dinner thing and then i am busy trying to become who i am so why did hannah strike such a nerve girls aired at a time when the figure of the annoying millennial was coming into our cultural consciousness hannah was a comic avatar of millennial haplessness she was supposed to be the butt of the joke but many missed that girls was trying to explore these generational topics often through being hard on hannah so why did the ultimate annoying millennial anti-hero inspire so much hate and did her struggles end up being more weirdly relatable than most want to admit why doesn't everyone struggling in new york move here and start the revolution [Music] it's the most infamous line in the entirety of girls and it comes in the very first episode but i think that i may be the voice of my generation or at least a voice of a generation early discussion of girls frequently centered on this line which was actually making fun of hannah's inflated sense of self-importance but many viewers interpret it in earnest as creator lena dunham herself claiming unsarcastically to be the voice of her generation and suggesting that hannah's extremely minor problems were supposed to be riveting to the audience and i'm sort of now accepting like that that's the line that's going to follow me around to my grave and as the show went on internet reactions to hannah still wasted no time in assuming that dunham was just as self-involved or out of touch as her character this misinterpretation fits into a larger trend where art made by women is viewed as solely autobiographical girls premiered during an era rife with auteur driven comedy series in which the main writer and producer also starred often as a thinly veiled version of themselves in shows like louis broad city and curb your enthusiasm congratulations on a great attempt at a chat and cut really good 99 times out of 100 that's going to work unfortunately i happen to be on the line and to an extent it made sense to see girls as semi-autobiographical dunham has said she was writing in part about her experiences and herself but it's crucial not to lose sight of the tone of denim's writing about herself girls was clearly a satire which rung comedy out of the awkward antics entitled privilege and self-absorption of the characters you know what i haven't been offered a beverage so i think i'm gonna get myself one if hannah is a version of dunham she's a self-parody constantly leaning into the most obnoxious parts of her identity many if not most of the other characters are constantly pointing out hannah's shortcomings in a way that often borders on cruel she's a lazy entitled manipulative myopic narcissist who knows a [ __ ] of a lot less than she thinks she does and hannah's issues with her body her career her sense of self are often treated as a joke when she articulates them suggesting that it's ridiculous to care or feel sorry for herself as much as she does i am 13 pounds overweight and it has been awful for me my whole life as grant land's andy greenwald wrote one of the things that impresses about dunham both the actress and the writer is how hard she is on herself no one could ever hate me as much as i hate myself okay so any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me i've already said to me about me probably in the last half hour yet as willa paskin put it in slate this is at the heart of most misunderstandings about the show the idea that in portraying selfish grotesque privileged behavior the show is co-signing said behavior instead of lampooning it a surprising number of interviews and articles even obsessed negatively about dunham's nudity on the show instead of caring what the show was saying about the character's attitude to her body they seemed shocked or offended by realistic scenes featuring a body that wasn't hollywood thin girls wasn't trying to make you like its characters nonetheless many people struggled with the show because of strong feelings of dislike for hannah and the others plus you should feel very confident because i'm a lot better at this when i'm not in the middle of an obsessive-compulsive meltdown much of this dislike for hannah stemmed from audiences disdain for dunham herself who's been mired in controversies throughout her career the same failure to separate the creation from the creator was at work in how girls played into millennial conversations the show came to be the premier cultural example of the trope depicting millennials as fundamentally irritating hyper-sensitive and self-important i think i just feel how everyone feels because i have three or four really great folk albums in me but public perception of the show ignored that denim herself was a millennial and that the comedy of girls came from the writers introspecting and interrogating the failings of their own generation am i seriously the only one of us who prides herself on being a truly authentic person hannah was really a millennial anti-hero one who embodied the flaws of her peers and encountered them in others so ironically hannah accidentally did become a voice of her generation though not necessarily in the way the character would have wanted to jeffrey why don't we not workshop my apology i think that takes us down a dangerous road workshopping each other's emotions by the end of this series hannah herself wants to grow out of all of the most heavily caricatured aspects of her personality and escape the annoying millennial trope end of the day that would just be me fulfilling all their expectations me and i would love to surprise someone who died but the aspects of herself and her generation that she couldn't escape may be what ended up making her sneakily relatable like another iconic tv anti-hero hannah has lost the ability to live the life she was promised but lately i'm getting the feeling that i came in at the end the best is over hannah is dealing with trying to build a life for herself in the wake of the financial crisis and slowly understanding that her dream of becoming a writer is just that a dream instead hannah bounced around through a series of unfulfilling jobs and discovered that in the millennial economy to quote the washington post's alyssa rosenberg writing sponsored content and coming up with fake trends is the available destination for literary hopefuls your whole story was just like a winky eye emoji followed by a poop emoji outside of her career hannah has basically accepted that a traditional picturesque family life isn't in the cards in one infamous episode in the show's second season hannah spends a weekend with an attractive doctor played by patrick wilson a plot seemingly designed to raise questions about standards of attractiveness and what people should want out of life please don't tell anyone this but i want to be happy the very idea of wanting to be happy is fundamentally embarrassing to hannah in part because she feels a normal nice looking life isn't possible for her you've got the fruit of the bowl the fridge with the stuff i want what everyone wants and the tragic note the episode ends on is that wilson's character abandons hannah the morning after she confesses these feelings he's evidently uninterested in fulfilling her hidden desires thus confirming her fears that this life isn't available to her underneath all the off-putting aspects of hannah there's something about her losses and failures that are fundamentally relatable as much as we might not want to admit it her self-loathing body image issues and sense of purposelessness are exaggerated but they're still recognizable to plenty of viewers who may have had those same thoughts and struggle to find direction in their youth i'm planning to write an article that exposes all of my vulnerabilities to the entire internet when hannah vocalizes everything that pops into her head many of us have suffered in silence and may feel even more embarrassed to hear hannah express our own insecurities out loud and i really care about you and i don't want to anymore because it feels too shitty for me however much they may have disliked her and not experienced her particular background millions of people watching then and now have dealt with versions of the same problems and dunham managed to weave humor and pain together to give voice to this sense of loss so perhaps what was most difficult to watch about hannah was how many of us could relate to her at times precisely when we didn't want to i just want someone who wants to hang out all the time and thinks i'm the best person in the world and wants to have sex with only me [Music] for most of girls hannah is just that a girl who is unable to grow up but the end of this series explores whether it will leave her as a woman through one of the biggest possible topics facing a young adult female motherhood hannah's unexpected pregnancy at the end of the series became a stand-in for broader debates about what it meant to be a feminist woman and how the constantly infantilized millennial woman would deal with getting older hannah decides to keep the baby a decision she initially makes just to buck expectations coming from the same doctor she had a fling with back in the second season makes you think i want to worship this is an example of hannah managing to surprise herself while still acting in character even if she isn't going to have a traditional family in the way she was raised to expect she decides to create one in the same messy impulsive way she's approached the rest of her life and she accepts help from the flawed friends who have been the focus of the rest of the series i would like to help you raise your baby as the quintessential immature millennial hannah ends the series in some ways seeming different like she's getting an adult life and in some ways just acting like the same old chaotic hasty self-involved symbol of generational arrested development because i made a very intense choice to take this on all by myself okay mom i buckle my bra every day okay but just do it for a second critics were divided between those who thought the responsibility of pregnancy was an effective way to snap hannah out of her extended post-adolescence and those who thought it would have made more sense narratively for her to get an abortion but there wasn't necessarily a right answer for hannah or for anyone in her position and it makes sense that in many respects she remains the same person even as she gets older and undergoes a dramatic life change hannah's millennial anxieties and insecurities come back but transition to being about parenting foreshadowing today's cultural focus on the elder millennial and what kind of parents millennials are turning out to be i'm a quitter so what if that's the kind of man that i raise what if that's the only kind of man i can raise by bonding with her own mother over their shared experience of parenting hannah discovers that there are some timeless things that you can only feel through connection getting outside of yourself and going along to whatever surprising places your life's journey takes you this is your baby this is my baby in the end dunham suggests that hannah's issues aren't just generational they're human i don't understand why you're yelling at me when i'm in emotional pain yeah well you know who else is in emotional pain poop [ __ ] everyone ultimately hannah horvith isn't lena dunham instead she functions as a fun house mirror that reflects and exaggerates fundamentally relatable human problems letting go doesn't come very naturally to me ten years after girls first premiered it's not hard to see hannah's wherever you look the economy is even more precarious and mental health issues are at all time highs especially with young people but hannah also provides hope to find a way out of those issues through her family the culture might want to forget about girls but hannah is still with us it can be pretty hard to have observations about other people when you're only thinking about yourself i would know thanks for watching the take make sure to subscribe and let us know what you want the take on next [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Take

Views: 122,829

Keywords: lena dunham, hannah horvath, jemima kirke, jessa johansson, allison williams, marnie michaels, adam sackler, adam driver, alex kaprovsky, ray ploshansky, shosanna shapiro, zosia mamet, loreen, desi, elijah, tad, charlie, fran, laird, caroline, hermie, evie, thomas-john, david, girls, hbo, millennial, antihero, the take, iconic female character, exaplined, nyc, new york city

Id: 9b6ZQGfy_II

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022